Drum Samples – Effective Cycling
Most music producers today, especially those just getting into the game, are overwhelmed by the thousands of drum samples and sounds offered by the multiple drum libraries offered through programs like Fruity Loops, Native Instruments’ Battery and Redrum (by Propellerheads, and included in their flagship program, Reason). So what can we do about it to prevent hair loss and allow us to get on with beat making?
A great way to get around this issue and start to ease your musical suffering is to organize the drum samples into folders and rename the files so they make sense. Name them for musical functions or for what genre they would be best for. Once you have done this with all of your available drum samples, you could have a very nice collection to keep referring to. Sometimes it’s hard to get samples out of a program like Reason because it locks its sound databases, and in these cases it can be beneficial to make patches from within the program to use for future projects within the same application.
If you can extract and manipulate the sounds so that they’re all in folders on your hard drive, what you may want to do is group all the kicks into one folder, all the snares into another, the hats into one more and so on, until all the percussion elements have been attended to.
The next level of this sorting system is to make parent folders to these ones. So, for instance, if you had the kick, snare and hi-hat drum samples folders visible, you can create a new folder for Rap or Dance (to illustrate my point), and move the dance-specific kicks into the kick folder within the Dance folder. Do the same for the snares, hats and other percussion.
Soon you will have folders that are specific to genres, and these will contain the different elements sorted into group folders. So if you want to make a Rap beat, head into the Rap Drum Samples folder, and then Dance samples in the Dance folder and so on. This will ensure that your creativity does not die down in the mundane task of finding some sounds to keep the energy flowing.
You can apply these strategies to sounds other than drum samples as well. Think how much time it could save you if you were going to have all of your sound patches and drums organized by genre and then also by the type of sound or drum? Only one disadvantage is on the mind right now: what if the sound is good for two different genres? Well, what you can do is include it in both folders or simply have a transitional folder, labeled, perhaps, Rap-Dance-Drums. This would indicate that the drums are good for rap music and dance at the same time.
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